Where are the girls?

Are you a male engineering graduate in India? If so, you probably are a washed-up, frustrated guy who has never been ‘touched’ by a girl and for whom the Holy Grail has been wanking off at the sight of the most beautiful nymph in some porn video. Okay, that’s not the prettiest picture to paint, I know. But can you, in your heart of hearts, reject my thesis? Not really. Anyway, what can a guy do if there aren’t enough pretty faces around? I mean, it is not about sex. You know how it feels to hang out with a hundred guys all in the same boat as you. You do. It ain’t the most wonderful feeling in the world. How we yearn to spend just one blithe, merry evening in some cafe with a radiant girl, away from the dreary sea of humanity. You can never be too careful about some Sena goons ready to teach us True Indian Values, but you will take that risk, won’t you? What a sorry state of affairs.

If only more girls got through competitive exams. What was that? So girls top most board exams now, their kind pass exams better than ours and yet only the keenest eye can spot one in a tech college induction ceremony. The feminists should be up in arms. They should demand reservation for the fairer sex in our educational institutions. And let’s be fair at that: give them 50%. They are half our population after all. What better way to further empower the New Age Woman. Surely, only the Yadavs will object. You don’t think that will do, do you? Do I feel an element of doubt in you whether those seats will be filled at all? After all, it’s not Indian Culture in most of our vast country for women to be the equals of men. Sometimes I wonder where all those girls go. Are they so intellectually inferior to us guys that they cannot qualify? Somehow I find that hard to swallow. They take the arts as an afterthought. That almost makes me feel sorry for the arts. What a second-rate creature the arts should feel like, if the arts could feel. I wonder whether that women’s reservation bill in the Lok Sabha can make matters easier for us boys too. Could that much-vaunted trickledown effect of reservations make a few more engineers out of girls? Or will it be blunted by the ineluctable forces of patriarchy? It would interest me to know whether those prudish Sena hoodlums send their daughters to any engineering schools. And it would really interest me to know whether they hide their prurient selves behind this image of an incorruptible whose mission in life is to promote True Indian Values among the flock that has strayed. They are the self-anointed custodians of Indian Morality; perhaps they believe that is above the law.

You wonder now what all of that has to do with the fact that there are so few women engineering grads. I say everything. If a woman begins to think on her own, doesn’t that undercut the domination of the male in her family? Does it not take the ‘Other India’ on a path it dreads? They say educate one woman and you educate a family. The fear probably is that you educate a woman engineer and you liberate a family, and that is not something the headstrong patriarch can tolerate. Liberty was one of the basic tenets of the French revolution, which ushered democracy into the world. Perhaps what they really fear is democracy itself.

Anyway, I only hope for some chicks to enter the hallowed portals of our engineering schools. It will do the boys a great deal of good. Perhaps improve their grades too; as they say, behind every successful man is a woman. For all the Greens out there, it will save some electricity and mitigate Global Warming too, if you know what I mean. Perhaps even make the eventual arranged marriage easier to negotiate, as even acquainting themselves with their betrothed is so awkward initially for many of our brethren. And if it changes our society a little, wouldn’t that be great too?